Book Review: The Killables by Gemma Malley

Title: The Killables 

Author: Gemma Malley
Series: The Killables, #1
Pages: 384
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Date of Publication: 29th March 2012
Source: Publisher
Synopsis from Goodreads: Everyone accepted that people were different physically. But inside? Inside, they were different too. You just had to know how to tell, what to look for.

Evil has been eradicated. The City has been established. And citizens may only enter after having the 'evil' part of their brain removed. They are labelled on the System according to how 'good' they are. If they show signs of the evil emerging, they are labelled a K . . . But no one knows quite what that means. Only that they disappear, never to be seen again...

My Thoughts:
I had high hopes for this book. I read the first book in Gemma Malley's other series, The Declaration, back when it was first released, and while I can't remember much about it at all, I do remember really enjoying it, so when I heard that she was publishing another dystopian series, I was excited. However, whether it was because I was in a bit of a reading slump at the time, or whether it was because my expectations were too high, but this book wasn't quite as good as I expected it to be. I liked it, but there was something missing.

I think one of the biggest problems with this book for me was that I couldn't help but compare it to other, in my opinion, better dystopian YA books that I've read in the past, like Delirium by Lauren Oliver and Matched by Ally Condie. I think that right now there are so many YA dystopians coming out, due to the popularity of The Hunger Games, so it's becoming difficult for books to really stand out in the genre, because there are so many out there that are so similar, that a book needs a spark of something new and exciting to make it really AMAZING.

The idea behind The Killables intrigued me, and I thought it had a lot of potential to be a really interesting read. However, nothing much happened in the book, and I didn't really see the point, for quite a lot of it. It took me a whole week to get through one hundred reeaaaallly slooooww pages, but I didn't want to give up and stop reading because I was hoping for such good things that I powered through to see if it got better towards the end. And it did... Sort of.

Once the main characters, Evie and Raffy, have actually escaped from their City, it gets a bit more interesting. There's more action, rather than whole chapters of explanation that I just got bored of. About a third of the way through the plot picked up, and I found myself quite enjoying it. It still wasn't the best book I'd read, but it was no longer a drag to read more than ten pages in one sitting.

For the most part, The Killables was just OK, although I did enjoy the last hundred pages quite a lot. If you're a huge fan of dystopians, then maybe this won't be for you as it is very similar and not quite as good as a lot of other popular YA titles right now, but if you're new to the genre and haven't read a large number of them, you might enjoy this more. I don't know if I'll read the next book in the series - the end was a bit of a cliffhanger so pure curiosity might get the better of me, but I'm definitely not on the edge of my seat waiting for it.

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